By training Dr. Phoebe Barnard is a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist with an interest in birds. During the last decade, however, she has focused her attention on conservation biology, policy, and strategic planning as they relate to African birds and their vulnerability and adaptability to climate change. Having first founded and led the Namibian national biodiversity and climate change programs, Dr. Barnard is now a senior scientist at the Climate Change and BioAdaptation Division of the South African National Biodiversity Institute in Kirstenbosch, as well as an honorary research associate and coordinator of the Climate Change Vulnerability & Adaptation team at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town. She graciously agreed to answer a few questions about biodiversity and climate change for Britannica’s Advocacy for Animals site, where this post originally appeared.

Britannica: Your research on biodiversity and climate change in Africa is fascinating and important. Would you please comment for us on how your interests developed and what brought you to Africa?

Barnard: Thanks, I feel lucky to work in an urgent field. It does drive me to get up each morning, to try to make a difference to the future of the world and its amazing, precious biodiversity. Individuals truly can make the world a better place, particularly in smaller countries, where the possibility for influence is greater. I was lucky to grow up with a family that values nature and natural beauty, and my father was a keen birder, trained as a geologist. When I met my English husband, also an ornithologist, we discovered we had a mutual passion for Africa and its wildlife, nurtured by [Sir David] Attenborough films and storybooks. We were offered a field project in Zimbabwe by Oxford University in 1983, and decided then and there to go. Our friends bought us airplane tickets as a wedding present!

Britannica: Climate change is expected to have a significant impact on biodiversity in Africa. What kinds of changes are expected, and what effect is climate change having already?

Barnard: I think it’s fair to say that where Africa is already hot and dry, it’s expected to get hotter and drier. Much of where it’s wetter, in grasslands, savannas and forests, it’s likely to get hotter and wetter—probably with more frequent floods and storms like those we’ve seen in much of the subtropics in early 2011. Most of these floods have been on the eastern margins of continents. Similarly, much of eastern and southeastern Africa is projected to have higher rainfall, with more intense cyclones and thunderstorms. We can already see the effects of global change (including land use change and land management) for biodiversity. We’ve documented range and population changes in a number of species from tree succulents (Aloe dichotoma) through to birds such as bustards, cranes, passerine birds, and birds of prey (see emerging maps from the Southern African Bird Atlas Project 2). Attributing these changes to climate change is admittedly not always easy, as climate change does not operate in isolation, and species are faced with multiple threats at once. But we are fast catching up with work in the northern hemisphere on this angle, and have very useful collaborations with Durham University in the UK to help analyse patterns. We are finding that the patterns of change are not always the same simple ones that can be seen in the north, where species generally move north, or up mountains, to cooler conditions.

Britannica: Obviously Africa has seen significant environmental changes over time. How do such changes as deforestation, desertification, and invasive species, etc., exacerbate the effects of climate change?

Barnard: Most species are badly affected by land use change. While in past millennia they may have been able to cope with climate change by simply moving across landscapes, now those landscapes are cut up, degraded, and new barriers of urban settlements, agriculture, and inhospitable land now occur. I believe that the effects of these multiple threats are generally very serious and very negative for many species. However, of course, there are some species that thrive on all this change. These tend to be the weedy, opportunistic species—plants, birds, insects, and disease organisms especially—which can cope well with human-altered landscapes. So we see fewer and fewer rare and localized species, and more and more species like crows, cockroaches, pigeons and weeds. The world around us is becoming far too homogenized. It’s like a thick and unsatisfying milkshake in a blender, without all the delicious berries and yummy bits we used to know.

Britannica: Are some areas of Africa more likely to be affected by climate change than others? You are very familiar with the fynbos in southwestern South Africa. Is it a particular concern in this regard?

Barnard: Yes, from a biological conservation perspective, the fynbos and other “global biodiversity hotspots” of Africa are very much under threat by climate change. This is partly because many of them lie along coasts (where their ability to adapt is constrained by the sea), and partly because some of them lie in arid areas, where conditions already seem to be getting hotter and drier very fast. The fynbos biome is incredibly rich biologically—it’s comparable in some ways to the rainforests of the Amazon and the coral reefs of Borneo. It is also facing enormous threats from invasive alien species, land transformation and water abstraction. Each of these is really serious in its own right, so it’s of huge concern to factor climate change into the equation too.

Britannica: Which African bird species are seen to be the most vulnerable to climate change?

Barnard: To be honest, it’s a little too early to say. In theory, the most highly vulnerable groups are likely to be dryland or fynbos species with very small ranges, like dune larks and perhaps Victorin’s or Knysna warblers; those with very specialized niches or ecological relationships, like Southern bald Ibises, blue swallows and Orange-breasted sunbirds; and perhaps migrants which have multiple places across the globe where they depend absolutely on disappearing habitats. But there just aren’t enough ecologists in Africa to do all the research that is needed to know this for sure. We are instead mobilizing a kind of “volunteer army” of civil-society volunteers to do a bird atlas (see the SABAP2 website mentioned above) to help document range changes without having to do very painstaking, detailed research work for every species. Ideally, we would be doing both together, for every species. But we can do only what we can!

Britannica: Your work with the South African National Biodiversity Institute, the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, and other such programs is part of the African scientific community’s response to climate change and its potential effects on biodiversity. Would you comment on this response, its strengths and also frustrations, etc.? How seriously do African governments treat the issue of climate change?

Barnard: I have worked on climate change issues since the late 1990s, when I first realized what a major impact it could have on Namibia, where my family and I lived for 14 years. Namibia is a small African country in terms of its global economic weight, the size of its professional population to do such work, and its resources to respond to climate change, although it is highly motivated on environmental issues. But like many African countries, some of which are much poorer, Namibia benefits from the focus on climate change that the international community and environmental conventions provide. Limited policy and scientific support are available to African and other developing countries which lack the internal capacity to do this work on their own, and considerably more is needed to help the continent adapt (particularly in the context of biodiversity and ecosystem services).

Africa is likely to be the continent most negatively affected by climate change, because it is dry and relatively poor. So it absolutely needs the collaboration and resources of the industrialized world to cope with a massive problem not mainly of its own making. I believe most African governments are now treating climate change very seriously indeed – on paper and in principle. But it is sometimes difficult for them to take the tough decisions, and achieve the necessary level of consistency, to act as rapidly as they need to. South Africa, the continent’s richest country, has plenty of professionals, funding, projects and political will (at least at some levels) on the subject. But it is still building coal-fired power plants, as it feels social instability will result if it experiences energy blackouts. So support from the north is needed to help it clean up its carbon emissions so that South Africa’s poor, who were so long excluded under apartheid from a decent quality of life, can benefit from electricity and clean water.

Fundamentally, this is what climate change is all about for the developing world—making sure that the inequality between rich and poor does not grow even worse, and that we can weather the changes ahead without too much social instability. Frankly, that’s a very tall order. But it’s quite possible if we plan ahead, change the way our economies and institutions work, and cooperate better as a global community.